The end of an era

Yesterday was the end of an important chapter in my life.

Eight years ago, whilst looking for a teaching job with less hours, it was suggested to me that, maybe instead of reducing my hours I should apply to be Head of German/2nd in Area at Ian Ramsey C of E School in Stockton. “OK”, I thought…after all it was much closer to home and the school I attended where I gained my passion for Languages. I applied and was successful so started in the following January.

I’ve certainly had my ups and downs and highs and lows over the last 71/2 years. I went from 2nd in Area to 2 days a week for 2 years after Dan was born and enjoyed that, although I found sharing all of my classes very difficult and when a full-time member of the department was promoted elsewhere I offered to return to work full-time. After some to-ing and fro-ing it was agreed that I would and was thrown in at the deep end  with a difficult timetable and finding out (by accidenet) the day before term started I was to inherit a Year 8 Tutor Group. However, having got over the initial hurdles I achieved and “outstanding” in our OfSted Inspection and began blogging and Tweeting.

Since then my career has gone from strength to strength with, with me having the opportunity to speak at various locations on a range of topics becoming a Links into Languages trainer this year. At work I compiled our (succesfull) International School Award portfolio last year and have set up many international projects and even had the opportunity to teach ICT this year (heehee). Over the last 3 years I also became very fond of my surprise Tutor Group!

Earlier this year I applied for and was appointed to a new post which begins in September, so yesterday ended 8 years of my life…in fact more like 14 years if we include the 5 years I spend there as a pupils and the 5 years that my sister spent there too (she’s 2 years younger than me). I was very sad to leave yesterday as I have made some great friends who I will be friends with for many years to come, I was given loads of support and guidance by some very special people who I feel very priviledged to have worked with and I got to work with some fantastic pupils-mainly from my Tutor Group.

So, whilst I look forward with anticipation and excitement to the challenges of my new post as Head of Languages at St. Michael’s RC School in Billingham I also want to say thank you to all those who made my time at Ian Ramsey such an unforgettable experience.

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The Wall of Language

The Wall of Language is a website that has been created by Nick Mair and Nick Friend with support of the Association for Language Learning and CILT for you to email prospective MPs questions about Language Learning. The website states

“Our aim is to make all political parties include a statement about the importance of languages in their manifesto.”

It’s easy to take part, just go to the website and follow the instructions on the Home Page. There are plenty of letters that have already been written that you can use and there’s even a link for you to find out who your Parliamentary Candidates are.

This is a great opportunity to see what importance our prospective MPs place on Languages, with falling numbers at KS4 and so few University students opting to take a Language degree.

I’ve written to the Labour, Conservative and Liberal Democrat candidates for my constituency, however unfortunately I couldn’t contact the Independent and UKIP candidates as they appeared to have no contact details. If someone could help me with that I would be very grateful )

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TeachMeetNE10

I was really pleased to read a tweet from Chris Harte that there is to be another TeachMeet in Newcastle on Thursday 29th April. This will be the third Northeastern TeachMeet and I’m really looking forward to being inspired again by some fantastic teachers from the local area and to meeting up with like minded teachers and old and new friends.

There is a change of venue for this TeachMeet – The North of England Institute of Mining and Mechanical Engineers – it’s near Central Station so should be pretty easy for people to get to.

If you’ve never been to a TeachMeet before, this is an ideal opportunity to come along and find out what all the fuss is about. For more information and to sign up here: TeachMeetNE10

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(My) Top Ten Tools for Digital Creativity in MFL

On the 23rd and 30th March Routes into Languages ran 2 International Festivals for Northeast schools at the Universities of Newcastle and Teesside. Alongside these 2 events, Links into Languages offered CPD for teachers who had accompanied pupils and asked me of I could run 2 sessions.

The first of these sessions was about online tools that we as MFL teachers can use to encourage creativity in our pupils and that we can use in our teaching to spice up our lessons. Below is the presentation I gave with my personal top 10 favourites. One day I’ll get as prefessional as Joe Dale and Lisa Stevens and take lots of photographs as well, altough that would involve remembering to take the photos in the first place!

Please feel free to contribute with other tools that you like to use…

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Enquiry based learning

Image: Danilo Rizzuti / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

As part of the preparation for the LinkedUp Project that we’re working on, I was invited to take part in a training day at Bedlington High School in December.

In conjuction with Newcastle University, the school have been running a programme in KS3 to promote and develop independent learning and thinking skills, which will equipe their pupils with the tools that they need to do well not only in the classroom but also that they can transfer into their lives outside of school. As our 14-19 project is based around developing  independent learning and transferable skills this was a fantastic opportunity to see these kind of activities in action across the curriculum.

The project is based around Habits of Mind which are essential skills that pupils can transfer to use outside of the classroom, whilst also improving their languages skills. Many of the tools involved are Thinking Skills, with the “Tool Kit” including such activities as diamond ranking, odd one out, venn diagrams, 8 Qs and, my current favourite, inference squares. What I particulary liked was they way the plenaries centered around which “Habits of Mind” pupils used and how they used them.

We watched 3 lessons, Food Technology, Maths and PE all at different levels- an education in itself, as I don’t think I’ve observed many lessons outside of my own subject area in the last 15 years. It was amazing to see how independent these pupils were. They were, not only able to work on their own far better than my own pupils but also able to articulate themselves so well! The confidence they had when speaking to adults was very impressive! Not only could they talk about the “Habits of Mind”, but they could also express how they used them in lessons and outside of lessons, why they were important but also how they felt that they made a lot more progress using enquiry-based learning. One thing that did concern me was a comment from an MFL teacher about not being able to do it properly in Languages!

Feeling inspired and determinded to show you can use enquiry-based learning in MFL I returned to my school on a mission. As ever, I’ve started small, introducing the Habits of Mind to my classes. We’ve talked about the Habits of Mind and how they apply to Language Learning and in many lessons we have focussed on these through the lesson, with the plenary focussing on which Habits of Mind the pupils have used and, more importantly, HOW. It’s been interesting to see that just about all pupils recognise the need to be persistent learners (something I’ve been very pleased to see!) and now I’d like to see them recognise some of the other skills they use on a daily basis – not only in MFL lessons but in all lesson.

For me, I want to develop this are as follows:

• Encourage pupils to discuss in groups how they use Habits of Mind
• Integrate “Habits of Mind” into more of my lessons
• Look at how I can combine the Habits of Mind with Learning to Learn
• Use Chris Harte‘s session on Debriefs, which he delivered at the lauch of our LinkedUp project , to help me taylor these strategies more towards MFL teaching – particularly in the Target Language aspect, to encourage more use of TL from my pupils.

I will keep you updated…

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LinkedUp

At the end of September I was approached by Zahida Hammond to work with her on an application for one of the new LinkedUp grants that are being funded around the UK, to promote language learning. The idea was to continue to build on work that local 14-19 MFL Networks had begun last year, creating resources and activities for KS4 and KS5 that use new technologies and  develop pupils independence.

After much hard work from Zahida, we learnt in November that the application had been successful and now it’s full steam ahead. We have 3 14-19 Networks working together on the project-Stockton, Middlesbrough and Whitley Bay with about 10 members across the network. We will all work on different aspects of the resources and they will all be shared together at the end. The idea is that we will use some technologies that will be new to some colleagues in the groups and also develop activities that encourage pupils to become independent language learners.

I’m very excited about this project and am looking forward to being able to use the resources created through the Networks and also to adapting the activities we create to being used in other topic areas and in other year groups too.

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Songsmith

Whilst at the MFL Show and Tell, Joe Dale told us about Songsmith (I’d read his blogpost about it before but I’m an Auditory / Kinaesthetic learner…) and was filled with possibilities and ideas. I couldn’t wait to find the opportunity to use it. Fortunately that opportunity showed itself soon than I’d imagined.

My Year 8 German class had been making “Haben” raps the week before and hadn’t got very far with them at all so I felt that the injection of Songsmith would be really beneficial.

As Songsmith is on my laptop and downloading anything onto a school computer is difficult as I don’t have administrator rights (and rightly so!) I decided we’d have a carousel-type activity. I split the class into groups of 3 and set up my laptop with a microphone in my office, gave a quick tutorial and we were away!

After they were recorded I popped them onto the Levelator and made podcasts out of them. They can all be found on my Langwitch school blog but I really liked this one best from “RP, BW, BS”:

RP, BW, BS

Langwitch Radio

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Go Animate and Peer Assessment

I had an impromptu lesson in our ICT suite a couple of weeks ago with my Year 7 class so decided to give Go Animate a go. I’d wanted to use if many times over the last few years but never quite had the opportunity – I think it may even have been blocked for a while – so was keen to get going.
I was very specific about what I expected at the end of the lesson, to avoid too much “playing” and not enough French.
At the end of the lesson they emailed their links to me – my school email addres, of course – and I was please to see what I received.
Once received, I put each one onto my Langwitch blog and then asked the class to go back to the blog and comment on one anothers’ work using the “what went well” and “even better if” format. Some of the comments were really lovely, such as:

“c‘est fantastique“

“that was great use of French, well done!“

“C’est fantashique! It was awesome, but the speach was very fast and you weren’t able to catch all of it. Bien! ”

“bien. I thought one thing you could of improved was to check the speech bubble cause one was english but I thought the rest was really good”.

I find it interesting that they were more critical than I would have been, but find that, generally pupils are more critical of one anothers’ work that I expect and often need to encourage them to find more positives!

I am now definitely a fan of Go Animate and have already used it again with my Year 8 class…they will appear shortly on the blog or wiki.

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Phonics, slidecasting and podcasting

Over the last year I feel like I’ve neglected the things that started on me on this journey that has revived my enthusiasm for teaching MFL – namely my school blog Langwitch and podcasting. However, over the last week I have begun to revive them, slowly but surely.
Through the wonders of Twitter I have come to know Suzie Bewell, SSAT Lead Practitioner for MFL from All Saints Language College in York. She has worked a lot with her pupils teaching phonics to improve pronunciation and has seem great improvements. With this in mind I trawled Amazon over the summer holidays and found a Jolly Phoniques manuel which was more or less identical to the kind of thing my 4 year old son was doing last year at Nursery (he’s very bright, you know-he’s now writing essays!)
Once I’d got over the initial shock of being back at work I decided to embark upon teaching my Jolly Phoniques. As I teach French and German (yes, I know and Spanish and ICT…) I felt it important to do justice to both languages, so I set to work on the German as well as the French. For my German, I took as my inspiration a resource that I found on Suzie’s Wiki Do Once and Share and adapted it for my needs and for my French I used the Manuel Jolly Phonique all the way. The pupils so far have received it well – particularly my Year 10 class, whose pronunciation, to be quite honest was dreadful! We do lots of chanting with actions and spend lots of time going over actions when we get to tricky words that need a reminder of how to pronounce them and it seems to be working well.
Next is where the blog revival comes in! (Just incase you were wondering!)
I got to thinking how I could help my pupils even more with their pronunciation and began to wonder about making a slidecast, using the PowerPoint I’d used in class, together with the classes chanting. Never having done a slidecast before, I was nervous. However, I went onto Slideshare and just followed the instructions. I uploaded the PowerPoint, uploaded the mp3 soundfile (which I mangaged to improve the quality of, after they were initially too quiet, using the Levelator, as recommended by Joe Dale) and syncronised it all, just as I was told. I think the results are great – and if I can do it, anyone can!
Next I decided that my pupils could also do with even more practice so I create (re-vamped) 2 podcasts – one for French (Radio Langwitch) and one for German (Langwitch Radio), to avoid confusion – so that they can download their chants and pretend to be cool listening to music when they’re really practicing their French and German! Of course everything is now on my school blog for my pupils to use and enjoy with the whole family.

Les Jolly Phoniques

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Eurovision – IRS Style

Yesterday I had the dubious priviledge of being involved in the organisation of my first ever whole year group event.

I chose Year 8 as the unwilling victims of this activity and we labelled it “EUROVISION”. Now if truth be told it didn’t really end up anything like the real Eurovision, it was more of a day that involved Year 8 finding out “stuff” about Europe and the EU. They did Internet Research, Geography, Art, Music and Languages in a kind of carousel. As far as I can tell, initial responses from Year 8 were very favourable.

In Art, they set to work designing new flags for EU Nations and even for the EU itself (well the stars are a bit boring…) and I’ve seen some wonderful designs that really the capture the nature of Europe, bringing in flavours of many member countries.

Music involved comparing various European National Anthems and, in particular listening to two very different versions of Ode an die Freiheit, the traditional version and this one:

They were then charged with the task of creating their own EU Anthems on the keyboards. All of which was really enjoyed by many Year 8s.

Geography saw them learning the names of key European countries and doing some Independent Learning in groups, researching physical and economic geography of chosen countries. Pupils found it fascinating to learn that the UK is so small in comparison to many other countries. I think some were quite surprised at just how big some countries are.

For Languages they had two possible activities, one involving learning about the origins of European Languages, which went down really well with the pupils and the other involving Spanish and designers. Both activities were really well received by the Year 8s.

The ICT Research project was rather chaotic, being the first activity of the day and involving lots of shared computers. Oh, and of course the old “blocked” problems (which was curious, as I’d checked them on Friday!).

I made a little plenary activity at the end. The pupils had to watch the video below and list which countries they recognised as being represented. There are 14…go on, see how many you get!

www: pupils seemed to like it and most staff seemed positive by the end of the day.

ebi: better organisation of the first ICT activity and don’t put them all in to do that at once, don’t get so stressed, check websites again and again and again.

Will it happen again? I hope so! (I believe so, with the introduction of project weeks next year!)

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